* Posts by ratfox

3721 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007

Google scolded for depriving the poor of privacy as Chinese malware bundled on phones for hard-up Americans

ratfox
Trollface

That's silly; the US government does not have the power to write regulations.

Yeah, says Google Project Zero, when you think about it, going public with exploit deets immediately after a patch is emitted isn't such a great idea

ratfox
Devil

I appreciate that they want to force developers to fix issues as soon as possible, but Project Zero has come across as holier-than-thou at moments. It's probably good for everybody that they are relaxing somewhat their stance.

From Soviet to science fiction icon, the weird life of Isaac Asimov 100 years on

ratfox

Re: frustrating genius

When I was young, I used to prefer his later work; it's the opposite now. The difference between the initial Foundation trilogy and the later additions is quite obvious.

I would snarkily say that his way of writing character relationships probably mirrored his own interpersonal skills: He was a brilliant conversationist and speech maker, but probably not a very empathetic person.

EA boots Linux gamers out of multiplayer Battlefield V, Penguinistas respond by demanding crippling boycott

ratfox

the makers of Lutris urged gamers – of all stripes, apparently – to avoid all EA multiplayer titles

I didn't know EA did multiplayer games... Or that anybody played them. Why not play literally anything else?

Fuming French monopoly watchdog is so incensed by Google's 'random' web ad rules, it's fining the US giant, er, <1% annual profit

ratfox
Angel

Re: no smoke without fire

It seems to me the ruling does not say that Google was unfair to Glibmedia; only that it was applying the rules inconsistently. A bit like people suddenly get booted off YouTube and you never get why that other guy is allowed to stay on.

Alphabet, Apple, Dell, Tesla, Microsoft exploit child labor to mine cobalt for batteries, human-rights warriors claim

ratfox
Paris Hilton

i guess Tesla does make their own batteries, but the others? And then, Apple and Dell are hardware companies, they make laptops with batteries inside; but Microsoft and Alphabet? Samsung and Lenovo at least would seem to be better targets...

GlaxoSmithKline ditches IR35 contractors: Go PAYE or go home

ratfox
Trollface

Re: Killing the Goose that lays the Golden Eggs

He still has his job, though, and will probably keep it for many years to come...

You had one job, Cupertino: Apple's Intelligent Tracking Protection actually gets tracking protection

ratfox
Trollface

I guess you would trust Google to find ways around tracking protection...

How many steps was that, then? Uncle Sam's lawyers, watchdog race to probe Google's Fitbit gobble

ratfox
Paris Hilton

When has a merger like these ever been rejected by the US? I'm genuinely curious.

Silicon Valley Scrooges sidestep debt to society through tax avoidance to the tune of $100bn

ratfox

Also seems to be a lie, as AWS provides most of their profits.

Note that the numbers are over the past decade, and it's only recently that AWS even shows up meaningfully as income.

ratfox
Stop

That's less than a tenth of what Microsoft paid in income tax during the same period, $46.9bn, even through Amazon's revenue during the decade exceeded Microsoft's by about $80bn.

Woah, stop. Just stop. Their argument here is wrong on various levels. First, income is not the same as revenue, and Amazon is in a low-margin business; it makes sense for them to have a much lower income than Microsoft, and pay less income tax. Second, they say Amazon's revenue exceeded Microsoft's by $80bn, as if this was a huge difference; but that actually means Amazon's revenue was around 10% higher than Microsoft's, since they both had revenues of about $1tn these past 10 years.

Large corp are not paying enough taxes, I can believe that. But people shouldn't randomly compare large numbers and claim it means something.

Vote rigging, election fixing, ballot stuffing: Just another day in the life of a Register reader

ratfox
Devil

You put a fake virus alert on the web site of your own customer? Slightly evil indeed...

Googlers fired after tracking colleagues working on US border cop projects. Now, if they had monetized that stalking...

ratfox
Alert

Would be nice if the world was that simple, however...

Legal proceedings should be governed by demonstrable facts not the "opinion" of the plaintiff.

The difference between romance and harassment is pretty much only in the feelings of the persons involved.

Otherwise, a defendant might only know if they were guilty of a crime retrospectively.

Legally, you pretty much only know if you were guilty of a crime when the jury returns the verdict, and that always happens long after the fact.

Anthos: Google's bid for Kubernetes differentiation ... and market share

ratfox
Trollface

Re: The more things change...

When it's Google, you're happy if the paying version is not shut down as well

White Screen of Death: Admins up in arms after experimental Google emission borks Chrome

ratfox
Devil

User: "Do you see the impact you created for thousands of us without any warning or explanation?"

Google employee: Thousands? Oh, not important then. It can wait until Monday.

High Court dismisses nameless Google Right To Be Forgotten sueball man... yes, again

ratfox
Trollface

Re: If this who

You know you posted this under your user name after posting it anonymously?

Shit. I forgot to make the post anonymous. I have deleted it now; thank you for telling me.

Wait. Is this post anonymous? Shit.

ratfox
Boffin

Re: It seems that ABC is well aware of the Streisand effect

Note that there are at least two people who have sued Google in UK under the Right to be forgotten, one has won, the other has lost, and as far as I know their name has been kept out of the media. This was extensively reported on this excellent website:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/13/google_right_be_forgotten_trial_nt2_victory_nt1_loss/

I remember that at the time I did not manage to figure out from tantalising clues the identity of these people, despite spending a couple of hours on the internet. I believe the gag order on their name is still in effect, so even if you know who they are, you are forbidden to reveal it.

Thanks, Brexit. Tesla boss Elon Musk reveals Berlin as location for Euro Gigafactory

ratfox
Meh

"the as-yet-unopened Willy Brandt Airport"

*OUCH*

Huawei. It's the patriotic choice: Mobe behemoth predicts 20% sales spike despite US sanctions

ratfox
Trollface

Re: Is there a silver lining here?

Is this an opportunity to get an alternative phone OS up?

Yes, probably!

Something based on BSD, for example?

Ha ha no.

Satya 'Karma' Nadella ignored our complaints over pay gap, thousands of Microsoft women say

ratfox

all the evaluations were done through the Calibration system which everyone agrees provides so much discretion to individual managers that the Dukes precedent applies

If the result of the policy of leaving everything to the discretion of individual managers is that there is a large pay gap across the company, I would say that there is a strong argument that the company should not have that policy, and that it is responsible for the result.

That said, is this 6% pay gap a job-for-job comparison, or the gap between the average pay of men and women at Microsoft no matter what their job is? If it's the first, it's way too much; if it's the second, it's surprisingly low for the industry...

DoHn't believe the hype! You are being lied to by data-hungry ISPs, Mozilla warns lawmakers

ratfox
Devil

Re: Google complains about data hungry ISP's??? Those are some swinging balls

I guess just the traffic data of websites would be invaluable by itself. They probably can also get traffic data because so many people use Chrome. And again because so many people use Google search.

But yeah, the fact that ISPs would not be able to get that data is certainly not going to make Google sad. Or anybody else.

ratfox
Devil

Re: Google complains about data hungry ISP's??? Those are some swinging balls

Astonishingly, Google claims they don't track users with the data from their DNS service

I know, I know, I didn't believe it either...

Bad news, developers: Apple Mac App Store tells cross-platform Electron apps to get lost

ratfox

Sounds to me like they want to kill of the private API, and they are shooing people away first...

A stranger's TV went on spending spree with my Amazon account – and web giant did nothing about it for months

ratfox
Devil

Dark pattern + invisible subscription = profit

So we did have weird AMZN... charges on our credit card, which didn't show up in the account on the Amazon website.

I called them just to check if it was really them, and the the guy immediately says yeah, I see those charges, they're for your Kindle subscription. What Kindle subscription?

1) Turns out that when you install the Kindle app on your phone, you get one of those magical dark patterns, which looks like this: screenshot

If you hit the big yellow button in the middle, you need to remember to cancel within the week, otherwise the free pass is renewed into a paying monthly subscription. I guess the back button is the only way to refuse the offer.

2) Their customer support could see our Kindle subscription, and the charges. However, we could not. Neither were showing in our account. Seeing the charges on the credit card was literally the only way we could notice anything was wrong...

Remember when Bezos whined about having too much money? Amazon's Q3 will help out with that

ratfox

Re: This is good?

To be fair, it does not seem unlikely that cloud computing is going to keep growing a lot. But online commerce is also growing, and Amazon's share of it is pretty huge as well. I wouldn't dismiss the storefront so casually.

Yay! The ozone layer hole the smallest it's ever been seen. That's not necessarily good...

ratfox

Still feels like we don't have a clue what's going on.

Google lashes out at DoJ, Oracle as it asks US Supremes to sniff Java suit one last time

ratfox
Angel

8 billion - that's what, 10 minutes ad revenue?

For Google, that's about three weeks of revenue, three months of profits or 1% of the market cap.

For Oracle, that's about three months of revenue, ten months of profits and 5% of the market cap.

For Somalia, that's one year of GDP.

For The Register, that's 6.8 DUP or 76 Pogbas.

YouTube thinkfluencer Siraj Raval admits he plagiarized boffins' neural qubit papers – as ESA axes his workshop

ratfox
Meh

700,000 YouTube subscribers and 70,000 Twitter followers — Is that a lot?

The sad thing is that we absolutely need educators who are able to present advanced research to the masses in an intelligible way. It's completely fine repeating the work of others as long as you don't claim you did the work yourself. You can even become famous in your own right by doing science vulgarization (Isaac Asimov comes to mind). Just pay respect when it's due, and give proper attribution.

Google Maps gets Incognito fig leaf: We'll give you vague peace of mind if you hold off those privacy laws

ratfox
Meh

They'll offer anything you want as long as the default is that the data is stored. The vast majority of people will never change the settings.

That said, it is definitely useful to me that my YouTube history is stored. That means that I will get suggestions for new videos in the channels I follow, and only new videos, not those I have seen already.

Google will not donate Knative framework 'to any foundation for the foreseeable future'

ratfox
Devil

Re: Corporate Behemoth Eyes Pie, Takes It

To be fair, Google actually cooked this pie, so they are not taking it but rather keeping> it. The question is why wouldn't anybody just fork the project and do whatever they want? I'm assuming this Knative is a very niche thing, and few people outside of Google have any interest in developing it, unlike Kubernetes which has many people interested and that Google does not control anymore.

The mod firing squad: Stack Exchange embroiled in 'he said, she said, they said' row

ratfox
Boffin

Re: Is this just an English thing ?

The Scarlet Pimpernel, written about a hundred years ago, uses "thou" and similar pronouns to reproduce in English the use of "tu" by French-speaking characters... En anglais dans le texte

Brighton perv cops community service for 'hacking' women's Facebook accounts

ratfox

I don't seem to remember that looking at pics of scantily clad women was a crime

Without their permission? Yeah, that's probably a crime.

600 armed German cops storm Cyberbunker hosting biz on illegal darknet market claims

ratfox
Paris Hilton

Re: This isn't the first time

Source for the story? This sounds invented.

How to lose a UK contractor in 10 days: Make them commit after upcoming IR35 tax upheaval, apparently

ratfox
Paris Hilton

Over one half of those questioned also believe the changes will discourage people from starting as contractors in the future

Well that's the point, innit? The goal of the change is to discourage the status of contractor, because having too many contractors is deemed either a huge loophole by the taxman, or a protection of workers who are forced by companies to work as contractors so as to avoid costly protections and holidays... Depending on who you ask.

US senators green-light recruitment of crack infosec teams, both public and private

ratfox
Black Helicopters

Are they going to call it Trendy Bear or USA Unit 61398?

macOS? More like mac-woe-ess: Google Chrome slip-up trips up SIP-less Apple Macs

ratfox
Gimp

Re: Why?

This may be Google, but Apple don't care. They ban whoever they want.

Google spaffs €3bn on power-grubbin' Euro bit barns while boasting of its 'biggest renewable energy purchase ever'

ratfox
Happy

Re: Ha ha ha ha

We all know the real reason Google is investing in renewable energy and it isn't because it cares one iota about the environment. It's just cheaper for them in the long run.

I didn't know that renewable was cheaper than nuclear energy these days; but if it is, well then that's good news!

'Ridiculous, rubbish, outrageous, complete bollocks': Just some reviews for Amazon's corporate contribution to Blighty's coffers

ratfox
Pirate

Re: Not really Amazon's fault

This. It's a bit weird to set the rules, then complain when people obey them too efficiently. Especially when many of these rules were specifically created to attract businesses in the first place.

The way I see it, a lot of rules in EU were pushed by the UK because they hoped they'd become the low-tax fiscal paradise for global companies operating in EU. They just never saw Ireland coming. And that may well explain the current clusterfuck^W political events.

Google engineering boss sues web giant over sex discrim: I was paid less than men, snubbed for promotion

ratfox
Gimp

Re: We Don't Like Anybody Very Much

"If everybody is favorite, then no one is!" — Syndrome

Hold up, ace. Before you strap into Firefox's latest Test Pilot, ask yourself...

ratfox
Devil

"Do I feel lucky"

Well, do you, punk?

Facebook: Remember how we promised we weren’t tracking your location? Psych! Can't believe you fell for that

ratfox
Devil

Re: Interesting phrasing

At least some of them are showing a notification, according to people already on Android 10. But I guess if you're using Android, you're fine with Google knowing your location anyway, right? Right?

Apple will wring out $18bn by upselling NAND to fanbois – analyst

ratfox

Meanwhile, the only reason I just bought a 128 MB phone (2017 model) is that it was somehow cheaper than the 64 MB. Go figure.

Look, we know it feels like everything's going off the rails right now, but think positive: The proton has a new radius

ratfox
Meh

What is even the meaning of "proton size"? It's not as if the proton is a spherical object as depicted on diagrams. At that scale, it's not even clear that we're talking about something physical, or a property of a magnetic wave, or a messy equation with side effects...

Yahoo! customers! wake! up! to! borked! email! (Yes! people! still! actually! use! it!)

ratfox
Windows

Re: Guilty Secret

I think the real problem is that Yahoo might well stop working at all soon.

It's fine to have an account you use for all your crap, but it should at least be something that is going to survive for a while. For instance, the email I give to The Register is a hotmail account, and I'm reasonably certain that Microsoft is not going to die anytime soon...

Maltese browser game biz flings €1m sueball at Google over Adsense kerfuffle

ratfox
Pint

after the American ad tech company, which also runs a search engine

I see what you did there...

We're great, boasts Huawei in founder's Little Red Book – but isn't that a video game screenshot?

ratfox
Paris Hilton

Compare the Huawei screenshot with this Russian-language history of the Ilyushin Il-2 Sturmovik aircraft, which includes plenty of photos of real Il-2s, including some with actual battle damage.

Interesting: I don't know if it was edited afterwards, but that website also displays the very same image from the game. It's the 7th image in the article.

European Commission inserts yet another probe into Google. This time it's the job ads service

ratfox

There's no end to this

Technically, anything that Google tries to answer immediately may be seen as unfair competition. They do unit conversion? That's unfair to unit conversion sites. They give dictionary definitions? Unfair to dictionary sites. Lyrics? Same. And so on...

The fact there are so many examples only illustrates how powerful Google is, just by being the first entity people will query about anything.

Female-free speaker list causes PHP show to collapse when diversity-oriented devs jump ship

ratfox
Paris Hilton

The world is not 50% composed of disabled people.

PH icon for diversity.

Audible hasn't even launched its AI-powered book subtitles and publishers have already fired off a sueball

ratfox
Stop

I'm with audible on this. I find supremely annoying the copyright owners who insist that any new use of their IP should be a brand new source of revenue.

And if users were to play an audiobook in front of a speech-to-text machine, they'd probably sue the users, claiming they only bought the license to listen, and not to read. And not in that country. And not on a balcony where passersby could catch a glimpse. Etc. Etc.

Beware the developer with time on his hands and dreams of Disney

ratfox
Go

I see your lizard and I raise...

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